Dawn of the Dead

Terrible cinematography. Terrible lighting. Terrible script. Terrible acting. Terrible score. Terrible . . . aw, it's not worth the time to go on. Though be forewarned: don't let the high rating and favorable comments fool you. Most of the people voting are cult fans of the movie and are rating it high for that reason alone. If a wider audience viewed this movie, then voted, it would have a rating of 1.0 at best. Let me tell you, it took the Exorcist - a true horror masterpiece - to cleanse me of this garbage called Dawn of the Dead. I suggest watching just about any other horror movie than this.

After being introduced to "Halloween," I was introduced to other horror movies for which I heard my peers talked about in school and after watching this movie on the movie channel, I was introduced to something more gruesome than anything else. "Dawn of the Dead" is the sequel to the popular cult "Night of the Living Dead" in which two national guards, a reporter and a pilot have escaped Philadelphia on a chopper after finding out that the whole globe has been affected with zombies resurrecting from the dead and attacking the living. The four of them hide out in a deserted mall where they think everything is safe until they realize that the reporter is pregnant and that they're zombies invading the mall. After exterminating the zombies, the survivors make the mall their own home where they shop for food, steal the cash and turn a small room into a personal resting place. "Dawn of the Dead" is by far one of the best horror films and sequels I have ever seen. It's dark, mean and much more violent than the original black and white horror film.

i couldn't bear watch the whole film. it was really stupid. annoying music, incredibly bad acting and zombies who would make you laugh to death before they ever reach you. this is one of the worst films i have ever seen. i would not recommend this to anyone.... a total disaster...

This movie is lame! Does anyone really find people painted blue and moaning constantly scary? A quote from a critic on the back of the video box went as follows "one of the best horror films ever made". Upon reading this I was foolishly suckered in and rented it out looking forward to having the living daylights scared out of me! Instead, I had a laughing attack not afforded to me since childhood! It really berates the horror genre when this movie is considered a classic. Its boredom all the way as people that look as though they've been face painted at the local church fete pass themselves off as zombies. A man on crutches heavily sedated could outrun these flesh-eating fiends. So to summarise, the make-up is poor, the script works well as a comedy and the film is as about as scary as a rice pudding without jam!

This movie has always been a big favorite of mine. I went through a zombie phase in high school and this is, hands down, the best zombie film ever made. With all the crap coming out today, it still stands out. Dawn is a great satire of materialistic modern society. All of the performances are spot on, George Romero's writing and direction is flawless as usual, and the gore is brilliant. What could be better than a bunch of zombies taking over a shopping mall? That's right, nothing. If you call yourself a horror fan and you haven't seen the original Dawn of the Dead, you need to get with the program immediately! No one messes with Romero, no one!

There's not much use denying it… George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" is one of the chosen few, absolute greatest horror films ever made and it's fairly unimaginable that a powerful movie like this will ever come out again. Even more than its 1968 predecessor, the landmark known as "Night of the Living Dead", this film contains literally everything to satisfy even the most demanding fan of horror cinema. Some films attempt to reach a maximum level of high tension throughout; some have eminent directors and/or a professional cast; some horrors will distinguish themselves from the rest by providing a lot of gore & gruesome make-up effects and others completely rely on uniquely atmospheric set pieces and filming locations. "Dawn of the Dead" consists of ALL these trademarks and yet a whole lot more! This film more or less begins where "Night" ended, with an alarming increase of zombies that feast their way through America. The opening sequences masterfully capture the growing sense of mass hysteria and disbelief in a TV-studio, where a 'scientist' warns the population not to regard these walking corpses as former family members or friends, but as mere monsters on the constant lookout for human flesh to feed on. These scenes introduce Peter and Francine, who plan to escape the big city in a helicopter. Cut to another very perplexing series of action sequences in which fellow policemen Stephen & Peter battle their way through a zombie-infested apartment building. Eventually these four characters flee together and entrench themselves in a large shopping mall complex. They can fairly easily handle the menace of the zombies here, but the biggest danger comes from typical human greed and selfishness. It's downright amazing how Romero manages to present such an implausible topic like zombie mayhem in such a realistic and incredibly disturbing way. He already did that in "Night of the Living Dead" but "Dawn" is entirely different film all together, since it contains a lot more humor and intelligently subtle society-mockery. The gore is sensational and plentiful (thank you, Tom Savini!) but the film never at one point drags in the tension or bad editing department. It's just, in one word, the perfect horror movie. There exist more than a dozen different versions of this film, which are all worth seeing at least once if only to spot the differences. Particularly recommended are Romero's original director's cut (duh!!) and Argento's European cut. This latter cuts a little on the dialogues and humor, but it features another brilliant soundtrack by Goblin! I could easily write another five page-essay about the genius of this movie, but it would just constantly re-confirm that it's absolute must-see! In case you haven't yet, make "Dawn of the Dead" a priority and also make sure you've got the horror-munchies!

Thoughtful if unsubtle epic follow-up to Night of the Living Dead was one of THE influential movies of the late 70's; pity, then, that the people it influenced paid more attention to the amped-up gore than to the sense of contained hysteria that makes what should be tough going (there are basically three scenes in this movie: zombies attack people, people attack zombies, people stand around talking) a uniquely involving and provocative self-analysis of the zombie film. The symbolism is, well, not delicate. Just in case we missed it the first time, the trope that the mall attracts the zombies "because it was an important place to them" is repeated for our rumination. But the overall sustained atmosphere, inside and outside of the banal environment of the shopping mall, is by far the film's salient contribution; even when there is no obvious action onscreen, there is the threat of an attack to come, and the clock is clearly ticking on the four protagonists during their idyll. Moreover, it takes the conspicuously familiar and catapults it into an apocalyptic situation, creating a powerful sense of displacement. The violence, which is primarily what draws people to or repels them from this movie, comes on strong, but quickly becomes monotonous (as it is, the vast majority of the violence in the movie is inflicted against the zombies rather than by them, though is none the less repulsive for that); the scariest part of the movie is how plausible it makes the concept of total disintegration of what we perceive as civilization. The soundtrack, highlighting pulsing, insistent synthesizer chords, contributes much to the onscreen tension, which the action choreography is exemplary. An unlikely masterpiece.

I don't understand how this movie can be rated to highly. Maybe it has got a large cult following? That must be it! Anyway, don't be fooled by the high ratings, this movie is rubbish from start to end! I starts with an annoying scene set in a TV studio. It's just chaos! It then switches to a scene where a SWAT team storms a building without any explanation. From the start, it's clear that "acting" is very bad i this movie! Also, the zombie make-up and blood just looks stupid! There's no horror here. As I watched this movie (I had to turn it off two times because it was so boring), I found myself sitting in disbelief with an open mouth wondering what on earth the director and script writer had been thinking. Everything just seems stupid and without reason. Take the scene where the two SWAT guys race around the parking lot in vans while "flyboy" is circling overhead in his helicopter. There's no explanation for this scene whatsoever. What were they doing racing around in the parking lot? Why was the helicopter overhead? Got no clue! At a point during the last 15 minutes, the whole thing becomes so surrealistic and bad that it's almost funny. But make no mistake. This is not fun! This is terrible, and one of the worst movies ever! The only good thing to be said about this movie is, that it spawned a remake in 2004 which is actually pretty good!

CAUTION: Possible spoilers Before I watched this horrible atrocity, I didn't expect it to be good and what I saw scarred me for life. In this movie, the main characters get locked in a zombie-infested mall. I was saying to myself "how are they going to survive?" But that question was answered by the characters using guns and fists to easily defeat any zombie that got close to them. Horror movies are good when there is lots of suspense, this movie had none! The characters were killing zombies left and right without any fight back! Also, in the middle of the movie, the characters attempt to live normal lives in the mall while the zombies were still in mall as well. Theres even a poorly done love story in this part. Toward the end of the movie, a motorcycle gang comes in and slaughters the zombies. This scene was supposed to represent human cruelty because the motorcyclists were ripping the zombies apart. I have seen this done in many more effective ways. So if your planning on seeing this movie, don't, and if you already have then your probably suffering the same pain Iam from watching that long torturous film. Pure dreck.

Dawn of the Dead is positively one of the worst films ever made. Yes, it is. It's worse than Manos the Hands of Fate, worse than Severed Ties, worse than Battlefield Earth, worse than Igor and the Lunatics... worse than just about any movie you could name. It redefined my conception of how bad a movie could actually be. There's nothing here. There's no horror, no poignant social satire, no scathing attack on American consumer culture. How can these characters be making some kind of a statement about American society when they're so stupid they don't even know what a shopping mall is? Look at them--they're dumb enough to steal money from a bank even though society has completely fallen apart and they can get anything they need from the mall anyway! And what kind of social commentary can you attach to that awful scene where the biker gang throws pies into the zombies' faces? Or the utterly useless racketball scene? Or the completely inappropriate Pac-Man musical score? Dawn of the Dead is NOT a socially relevant film. It's just two very long hours of garbage--ugly, poorly acted, ludicrous garbage. I've tried to like this movie, I really have. But there's nothing worthwhile in it. It's not scary, it's not entertaining, and it's not meaningful. It's just a sad, painfully misguided waste of time. Heaven save us from George Romero and his alien brainwashing ray.